Tearing Up a $125M Check to Big Blue

House treated his time at the CPU giant partly as a front row seat on its evolving style of high management.

"I had Andy Grove as my manager for 13 years and during that time he wrote three management books," he said. "We owned a sailboat and took ski trips together and he bounced ideas off staff about the books -- I considered Andy a great guru," he added.

Intel is well known for its culture of so-called constructive confrontation, which puts decisions into heated debate.

"At Intel, it was almost advocated you need to fight more, but that doesnít work in all cultures -- it doesnít work in Japan, and it's different in Germany and China," said House. "I prefer what I call straight talk -- constructive confrontation is an American methodology, but straight talk is international," he added.

"The most important process in any organization -- and it's not discussed at a significant level -- is decision making," said House.

He advocates pushing decision making down a corporate hierarchy where detailed knowledge rests. But the process needs to be supplemented by a breadth of vision, something consultants can help provide, he said.

Among his other suggestions:

Choose a decision maker and abide by him

People will support decisions they are involved in, but donít want them coming over the wall

Not many companies could throw around such a negotiations tool as a $125 million check. One interesting aspect is that, while Intel obviously reaped great rewards for the "Intel inside" program, I think it did a lot to make AMD a household name too.

I agree doc divakar on both counts...standing meetings are great, never last more than 30 mins in my experience...and Intel need to get "outside", "inside" was nice while it lasted but they probably need to start building more integrated products going forward...Kris

I couldn't agree more with "Hold fewer, shorter, smaller meetings." Standing only meetings are even better. I have often come across managers who use meetings to do their thinking by others that they should have done by themselves in the first place!

"Intel Inside" was successful while it lasted. Now a days, it is a survival challenge for that message! Intel still doesn't play significantly in handheld computing market. I wonder what Mr. Dave House would do in today's state of the computing market.